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Restoring Our World to WholenessMon, 16 Jul 2018 21:39:39 +0000en-UShourly1As Elaine Said of Her Orgasm-Fake Fake Fake Fakehttps://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/as-elaine-said-of-her-orgasm-fake-fake-fake-fake/
https://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/as-elaine-said-of-her-orgasm-fake-fake-fake-fake/#commentsMon, 21 Nov 2016 19:40:12 +0000http://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/?p=43Recently Facebook has provided us with a list of fake news media outlets. Having read it, I can only suggest that the list is incomplete. I would like to note that the following fake stories were widely distributed in major media outlets and yet these outlets, even when repeatedly publishing fake stories, seem to have been missed by Facebook’s helpful list. Let’s recall ten famous stories that were circulated by the mainstream media that later turned out to be fake. 1. The heroic death of American football star, Pat Tillman as reported in The NY Times Former N.F.L. Player Killed in Afghanistan. He was killed by friendly fire. There is some speculation he was intentionally killed because he was going to report his fellow soldiers for drug trafficking. 2. The heroic fight of Pvt. Jessica Lynch as reported in The NY Times as Saving Private Lynch. Apparently, she was unable to fire her weapon. 3. The Duke Lacrosse team rape case as reported by Selena Roberts in The NY Times. 4. Iraq’s possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction as reported by Judith Miller in The NY Times. 5. The story of Jimmy, the 9-year-old heroin addict, as reported by Janet Cooke in the Washington Post. 6. Anything by Jayson Blair published in the NY Times. 7. A Rape On Campus, Jackie’s story, as published by Rolling Stone magazine. 8. The widely reported Serbian genocide of Bosnian Muslims, including an article in the Washington Post suggesting that more than 5000 Muslim men had been killed by the Serbs. This article, together with other similar ones, triggered a US bombing campaign killing thousands. The UN Court dismissed the claims that a genocide occurred prior to the bombing. 9. The widespread publication of the Congressional testimony of 15-year old Nayirah regarding the Iraqi troops dumping Kuwaiti babies from incubators onto the floor. Turns out that Nayirah was Nayirah al-Sabah, daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the US, who wasn’t even in Kuwait at the time of the invasion. 10. Gaddafi’s soldiers being supplied with viagra and ordered to engage in mass rape as reported in the Daily Mail. Susan Rice made this claim, but it was never substantiated. I would defy anyone to produce a list showing a single US/European media outlet tied to a greater number of utterly fake news stories than The NY Times. Who can forget The NY Times accepting the Pentagon version of the events in the Gulf of Tonkin, which led to the disastrous expansion of the War in Vietnam? Even without referring to the fabled Pulitzer Prize-winning Walter Duranty, a liar who managed to ignore the mass slaughter of the people of Russia by Stalin, I still think The NY Times can fairly be credited with inciting or covering up more mass murders than any media outlet anywhere in the world. When Duranty is included in the mix, there can be no doubt which media outlet has published the most damaging fake news over the last 100 years. Remember the words of Elaine Bennis, “fake, fake, fake, fake”. You have been warned.

]]>https://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/as-elaine-said-of-her-orgasm-fake-fake-fake-fake/feed/1The Doctor is Not In Part 4)–Side Effectshttps://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/the-doctor-is-not-in-part-4-side-effects/
https://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/the-doctor-is-not-in-part-4-side-effects/#respondWed, 21 Sep 2016 23:27:37 +0000http://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/?p=38Post Hospitalization Recovery This post and the next one in this series, is co-authored with Kerri Affronti. Let’s begin where we left off with K. For those of you just starting now, here are links to Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of the saga. K left the hospital on December 17, 2014, after being given four shots of Humira. She had refused to be sent to a nursing home, which was largely for senior citizens and would not have provided follow-up care or physical therapy. Instead, she went home. After some half dozen visits from a physical therapist, K developed her own recovery plan for regaining her strength and fitness. From mid-December 2014 through April 2015, she spent her days re-learning how to walk, swimming and exercising using a routine she created. Her own knowledge of physiology and her fitness level when she had been healthy allowed her to tailor a plan uniquely suited to strengthen her body, but not to overtax her weakened heart. While she improved significantly faster than her doctors expected, it still took almost four months before K recovered enough to return to work. Finally a Primary Care Physician K found a group of gastroenterologists in Santa Monica and chose one of the group as her physician. Her medical files were much too extensive for the doctor to review in detail, so he took notes as K described her experience, medical treatment and prescription drugs she had taken over the prior four years. Side Effects–Physical and Otherwise In September 2015, a short 5 months after she had returned to work and once again built up a base of private paying clients, one of them noticed a small mole on her back that seemed to be getting larger. Despite her reluctance to see yet another specialist, K made the appointment with a dermatologist. On Oct. 7, 2015, she had surgery for what was diagnosed as a Stage 1 Melanoma. It was a two-hour surgery, but K went home that day. She went right back to work and, with rare exceptions, didn’t mention the diagnosis to even her closest friends. In January 2016, K learned from her gastroenterologist that one potential side effect of Humira is that it may cause melanoma. That’s right, the medicine she was taking to control her life-threatening illness could cause a life-threatening illness. Both her Primary Care Physician and her Gastroenterologist advised K to get a second opinion on whether she should continue taking Humira in light of her melanoma diagnosis. As a consequence of being in a business where she worked with physicians, K was able to secure an appointment quickly with both a renowned oncologist and a rheumatologist in January 2016. Without those relationships, she would likely have waited six or more months to see such specialists. Seeing the Specialist At K’s January 2016 appointment, the oncologist spent four hours paging through all of K’s medical history and discussing her treatment with her. He recommended K have a PET scan to assess whether the melanoma had spread. In the end, he concluded that Humira could have caused of the mole’s irregularities.”Could have caused,” he said. Everything now hung on that statement. It was now up to K, her Gastroenterologist, and this oncologist to determine whether or not to keep K on the Humira. He told his receptionist to make a follow-up appointment for K in a week. It was more than a month later before he saw K again. Before discussing K’s actions further, we ought to note a couple of policy implications from K’s predicament with Humira and doctors: Physical side effects from prescription drugs are not only common, they are multiple, they are to be expected, they may be compounded when anyone is on multiple medications and they may outweigh the benefits of treatment. Doctors know that some people –even seriously ill ones–will recover fully without any treatment and some will die even with the most efficacious treatment, i.e., it is not necessarily so that a diagnosis should always result in a prescription. If you are sanguine about the prospect of being cured of your lifestyle disease through the use of prescription drugs, I urge you to visit this site and check out the reviews which explain how prescription drugs are determined to be beneficial. In addition to the known physical side effects of drugs, a secondary side effect of the regulation of medical care in America is a shortage of physicians, especially primary care doctors who are under-compensated relative to certain specialists and specialists in high demand fields, such as rheumatology. As of 2014, there were 318.9 M people in the United States, all required by law to carry health insurance and all needing a primary care physician in order to access the health care system (see Part 1 and Part 2); however, there were only 916,264 registered physicians in the United States. It is simply impossible for all of those 300+ million people to be seen by less than 1 million physicians. K was very lucky that she knew doctors who knew specialists or she may have waited months for an appointment, notwithstanding the critical nature of her condition. Taking Healthcare Into Her Own Hands By the time the oncologist saw her again in late February she had decided to take herself off the Humira as of February 4, 2016. It’s difficult to overstate the complexity of her decision. Humira had helped her initially, but it seemed less efficacious by late 2015/early 2016. She was quite sick from the ulcerative colitis in January and melanoma is a deadly illness as well. The PET scan, which was negative for any spread of the melanoma, was difficult and painful. As noted above with respect to any illness, some people will get well and stay well without treatment and some people will get much sicker even with clinically appropriate treatment. Notwithstanding all the poor treatment and shuffling about K had received at the hands of the medical care industry, it had (in her opinion) likely saved her life on more than one occasion during the acute phase of her illness; however, in every instance of the recurrence of her illness, she had to make the decision about the course of treatment and suffer the effects of the treatment. When she had decided to take Humira, she had committed to that path to recover from her illness. When she had become quite sick again while still on medication and she had to cope with the melanoma diagnosis, she was forced to reevaluate whether she had chosen correctly. When people have a chronic illness though they don’t just live in an acute phase, they also experience periods when they are not acutely ill, but nor are they well. There is no support system in Western medicine for someone during the non-acute phase of a chronic illness. K was uniquely able to help herself due to the knowledge that she had of anatomy and physiology in general and also her intuitive knowledge of her own body’s response. Further, she had been exposed to alternative medicine throughout her career. She knew how to utilize these therapies to assist her in recovery. The Holistic healthcare industry addresses the need people have to be supported through the non-acute phases to realize a long-term solution to their ailment. There are multiple therapies which are available to those who are seeking resolution and healing, including methods such as Massage Therapy, Acupuncture, Meditation, Gyrotonic, Pilates, Yoga, Chiropractic, Cryotherapy, Infrared therapy, Nutritional therapy, and more. In the stage when pain management is critical, it is in these places people can find caring, compassionate, attentive practitioners who are able to follow-through. While there appear to be an adequate number of people providing alternative services, untold amounts of money is expended on Managed Care, billing specialists, state health care coordinators, state exchanges and other non-health care providers, i.e. the patient’s resources are depleted by administrative expenses and cannot be utilized for these much needed additional medical services. Patients are further challenged in accessing these services since the alternative care providers are not integrated into the medical model. The Moral of the Story The moral of the story is: There are not now, nor will there be in the foreseeable future, an adequate number of medical doctors available to care for all the sick people in America. This means that it is imperative that we stop forcing people to expend their limited resources to pay costs (such as, complex billing costs, private and public administrative overhead costs of care deniers and inflated medical costs) that do not benefit the payor. If individuals have control of their own finances, they can better access the services they need at the level of care they need.

]]>https://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/the-doctor-is-not-in-part-4-side-effects/feed/0The Doctor is Not In (Part 3)–But He Does Finally Appearhttps://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/the-doctor-is-not-in-part-3-but-he-does-finally-appear/
https://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/the-doctor-is-not-in-part-3-but-he-does-finally-appear/#respondWed, 14 Sep 2016 17:59:15 +0000http://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/?p=33We left off Part 1 and Part 2 with K and I returning to her home, her still incredibly ill and me needing to return to my own home in Atlanta. Her mother arrived on Thursday, December 4th. This part of the story is drawn from the notes I made while texting and speaking with her mother and consulting with California Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC). K was so ill at this period in her life, she still only remembers bits and pieces. Who Are These People and What Do They Want? Before K’s mom arrived in the afternoon of December 4th, K and I attempted to reach the insurer to discuss a viable treatment plan. After some 20 minutes on hold, we reached a young woman having limited English skills. I wanted to discuss the insurer’s response to the Expedited Grievance I had filed earlier in the day. She was unable to understand me. She thought I wanted to file a grievance and tried to direct me to the insurer’s website. Upon my insistence, she agreed to transfer me to her manager at which point my call was dropped and never returned. Later in the morning, we received several calls from representatives from Managed Care–this is the group that denied care the prior evening. It turns out that the insurance company doesn’t handle that task directly. They hire a third party to do so on their behalf. Apparently, the Expedited Grievance and the involvement of the DMHC (who had sprung into action and sent interrogatories to the insurer by the afternoon of December 4, 2014) was sufficient to cause Managed Care to attempt to provide service. For the record, the insurer had 72 hours to file a written response to the interrogatories from the DMHC. They never filed a written response and, as far as I know, nothing ever happened as a result. K was much too ill to speak with anyone. The Managed Care representatives all seemed to assume that I knew who they were and why they were calling. They would start rattling off names and numbers without any hesitation and without my understanding in the least what they intended. Finally, a young woman from the group called to provide us with the name and phone number of a rheumatology specialist who was willing to see K the next day. We inquired as to the location of the specialist’s office and the young woman assured us it was near to K’s current residence. Later that day we found that it was some fifty miles away from her current residence. The location of the specialist was based upon K’s prior address, which K had unsuccessfully attempted to update multiple times with her insurer since her move three weeks earlier. Of course, K was much too ill to make the long drive across town. Further, she did not want to establish a relationship with a doctor far from her home, when nearby doctors were equally or more qualified. That mattered not at all. It was, according to Managed Care, this specialist or none at all. More Trips to the Emergency Room It was only later I learned how much K’s condition continued to deteriorate and how truly outrageous the insurer’s conduct became. Over the next few days, the insurance company directed K back to the UCLA Medical Center ER two more times. Once she was taken by her mother. On the second occasion, the insurer sent an ambulance to her home to take her to UCLA. In both instances, after K spent hours in ER doped up with opiates, Managed Care denied admission to UCLA. One ER doctor even signed a document stating that K’s condition was too critical to allow her to be transferred. K could overhear the urgency in the doctor’s voice as he spoke with Managed Care. Following additional pressure from Managed Care, this same doctor changed the document to allow for a transfer. Following the doctor’s concession and K’s midnight agreement, K was transferred to a hospital some hour and a half away from UCLA in the middle of Tuesday night, December 9. She was still in critical condition. Without any sense of irony or responsibility, the insurer later refused to cover the ambulance company bill for the transfer to the new hospital. K is Admitted to A Hospital K still had no primary care doctor nor any relationship with a specialist. Upon K’s admission on the 9th, the new hospital began to redo all the tests which had been done at UCLA Medical and sent to it. No doctor reviewed the UCLA test results. Clearly, the tests were a profit center for the hospital and it mattered not one whit that they were redundant and/or painful for K. Redoing the tests not only wasted money, but it also wasted critical time as K’s condition deteriorated while awaiting test results. During the week of the 9th she almost died again; her heart so weak. Had the tests had been reviewed and treatment started, K’s hospitalization would likely have been 2-3 days instead of the twelve days it turned out to be. The Insurer Demands K Be Transferred Again By the early afternoon of the 10th, Managed Care attempted to transfer K to another facility for “rehabilitation.” Not surprisingly, K’s condition had not improved overnight. She was also scheduled to see two specialists in the hospital where she had been admitted later that same day. Those appointments –her first with specialists–were scheduled after the time she would have been transferred to a rehabilitation center. K still had no diagnosis, except for a wound on her leg had been tentatively diagnosed as pyoderma gangrenosum (a very serious infectious illness requiring prompt attention), no discharge plan and no rehabilitation plan. Upon learning Managed Care’s plan, K’s mother contacted Managed Care, K’s brother who is an attorney also contacted them and I contacted the DMHC (which had closed K’s file upon her admission to the hospital). Together, we commenced the fight to keep K in the hospital till she had at least been diagnosed and stabilized. Through multiple daily telephone calls between K’s mom and K’s brother with Managed Care, the threat that DHMC would be re-involved, perhaps the hospital administrator’s realization that they could be faced with an EMTALA suit, the diligent attention of kind, capable nurses in the hospital, and K’s knowledge of how to deal with the doctors, we all managed to keep K in the hospital until Wednesday, December 17th. During her hospital stay, K saw the specialists that she needed and finally received a diagnosis, which turned out to be Ulcerative Colitis. She even had her leg wound attended and began to take a few steps with the assistance of a physical therapist. Going Home Of course, the work of Managed Care isn’t complete until it manages to make a complete hash of the care the ill person receives at home. Managed Care attempted to discharge K without her having received the first Humira injection ordered by her physician. Her mother insisted it be administered in the hospital in the event of an adverse reaction. Further, K’s doctor ordered continuing treatment for her leg wound and physical therapy. Managed Care ordered a single day’s physical therapy and a single day’s wound care. This may have been retaliation for K’s resistance to being transferred to a nursing home, or it may have just been incompetence. It was hard to tell where negligence left off and actual malice began. Since K had not walked in weeks, the idea what one day’s physical therapy would be adequate was ludicrous. In the end, the nurse who came to treat K’s leg wound at home did not have the prescribed antiseptic, nor did she know how to obtain it. K’s mother is nothing if she is not diligent. She found the antiseptic on Amazon and had it delivered the same day. She assumed responsibility for caring for K’s wound herself and this proved to be all the care that was needed to finally heal the wound. Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch For better or worse, all of the foregoing events were overlapping with the brief window of time K had to choose her insurer for 2015. Her current company automatically re-enrolled her. This only makes sense, when one realizes that not only was her premium subsidized by taxpayer dollars, but the insurer was protected from losses due to certain provisions of the Affordable Care Act expiring after 2016. Still, K clearly wanted nothing further to do with that insurance company or the related Managed Care company. K’s mother found a much more expensive insurance plan (not one subsidized through the exchange), whose coverage was accepted by a competent primary care physician near K’s residence. She also extended her stay at K’s home through early January 2015. By the time her mother left to return to her own home, K had a better, albeit more, much costly insurance plan, a diagnosis of Ulcerative Colitis, a primary care doctor near her current residence, a prescription for Humira and a start on the road to recovery. The Moral of Part 3 of the story is: One, the moral of Part 2 bears repeating, health insurance is not health care. Two, hospitals are no place for sick people. You absolutely must have an advocate by your side at all times. Even under the best of circumstances, well-meaning, diligent government employees can do very little to assist you with receiving health care.

]]>https://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/the-doctor-is-not-in-part-3-but-he-does-finally-appear/feed/0The Doctor is Not In (Part 2)-Health Insurance Is not Health Carehttps://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/the-doctor-is-not-in-part-2-health-insurance-is-not-health-care/
https://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/the-doctor-is-not-in-part-2-health-insurance-is-not-health-care/#commentsSat, 03 Sep 2016 17:59:38 +0000http://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/?p=30We left off Part 1, with K still recovering from an illness that nearly killed her and ruined her credit but didn’t ruin her spirit. What happened next? Before going further, I ought to note is that K is not and never was estranged from her family. She and they were in frequent contact. They assisted her financially to the best of their abilities and often came to assist her during her bouts of illness. She consistently chose not to return to her hometown, which lacked business opportunities and where the climate worsened her symptoms. More Diagnostic Tests With no further savings and having recuperated from the worst phase of her illness in January 2012, K returned to building her business, saving funds for a rainy day and devoting time to recovering her own health. She even purchased new equipment for her business. Matters seemed to be looking up. By the summer of 2012, she was quite ill again and she and I were together a great deal. I noticed that her thinking became distorted when she was at her sickest. She had tremendous headaches and became convinced that the air pressure of a second floor room (as opposed to one on the first floor) made her headaches more unbearable. I was very concerned about her ability to manage her own care. She didn’t have a primary care physician due to her lack of insurance and lack of funds. Whatever care she received was what she determined at her own initiative. Since she hadn’t gotten a diagnosis for her illness in 2011, K scraped, saved and got a roommate to save up for series of diagnostic tests. She thought she had Crohn’s Disease, an auto-immune reaction characterized by inflammatory bowel disease. In summer 2012, she had a series of diagnostic tests at an Atlanta gastroenterologist, which she self-funded at the cost of several thousand dollars. Despite her continuing illness and the myriad of symptoms she was experiencing, the tests came back negative for Crohn’s or other inflammatory bowel diseases. I can’t tell you how much I came to admire, appreciate and love K. I admired her determination to heal her own body. I admired her crazy, ridiculous optimism when she was feeling well and even when she wasn’t. I admired how she turned on the charm for people because she preferred they not see how sick she was. I came to believe in her ability to heal herself more and more. I saw her intuitive knowledge of other people’s bodies. She straightened out my leg that had been twisted from a water skiing accident twenty-five years earlier. I never expected it to be straight again. I almost believed that she could heal herself, her abilities were so strong. By the end of 2012, she felt a lot better. She was so much better that people who met her didn’t realize how sick she had been and how difficult was the path to a full recovery. Leaving Atlanta for Sunnier Climes In January 2013, K decided to leave the subtropical South for the warmer, drier climes of SoCal. It wasn’t a hard move. She had already sold most of her belongings. There wasn’t a lot to pack. The California climate agreed with her. She started feeling even better. She got busy developing a new client base in a new region of the country. All seemed to be well. I visited her in her new home. We drank wine, hiked, went to the beach and I was thrilled to see her happy, healthy and busy. Then, right around Thanksgiving in 2014, K and I were chatting on the phone and she alluded to some very troubling symptoms. I said I was coming to California immediately. The Relapse; Now K Has Insurance When I arrived on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, she met me at the door and told me this was likely to be the best she would feel for the day. Little did I know how very, very ill she would become. I have never seen a person so sick. She had so many symptoms–bloody stools, boils, swollen, painful, twisted joints–her left foot curled under on its own volition like the Chinese girls used to bind their feet–headaches and blurred vision. It was a cascade of symptoms each seeming more painful and debilitating than the others. Nothing that I did or she did for herself could make her more comfortable. Sleep was impossible. She suffered more than any human I have ever seen. K had moved recently. This turned out to be of tremendous significance. She had purchased insurance, a “silver plan,” bought through the State of California health insurance exchange. Even though she now had insurance, she had not yet been able to find a primary care physician in the area she now lived. She had begun a serious search for a new physician prior to my arrival. We decided this was the first priority to attend to. She and I spent almost all of Monday attempting to locate a physician to see her without success. After many attempts to reach K’s insurance company on Monday, we were finally did reach the company on Tuesday and were given the names of approved primary care physicians in the area K now lived. When we called their offices, we found that all of the doctors recommended by the insurance company had closed their practices or relocated. One doctor appeared to have lost her/his license to practice medicine. When we attempted to re-contact the insurance company, their phone wait lines were so long, all calls were dropped. Shortly thereafter, their website crashed. The Good Samaritan Doctor As the result of a personal relationship K had with a medical resident, she was able to gain an appointment for consultation by a rheumatology specialist who agreed to see her Wednesday, more than two weeks after K had begun to search for a physician. The doctor further agreed to accept a significantly reduced fee paid by K since she did not accept the silver insurance plan K had purchased. After consulting with K for some 45 minutes, the doctor advised K to go to UCLA Medical emergency room immediately for tests and admission to UCLA Medical. The First Hospital The doctor was as good as her word. UCLA Medical’s ER team had been alerted and K was immediately whisked into an examination room. Nurses drew blood, took vital signs, administered morphine and planned an admission. While K was still in tremendous pain, she visibly relaxed. She even asked me to get her some food from outside the hospital. We talked and laughed while we ate and planned for her finally receiving the care she so desperately needed. After a couple of hours, K grew concerned. She had had a lot of experiences with hospitals. Things did not seem to be going well. Her instincts were better than my own. Her insurance company, moribund for three days, had sprung into action at the point it might have been forced to pay for her care. It denied coverage for admission to UCLA. A hospital administrator came to tell us that the insurer was requiring that K be transferred to another hospital, WH Hospital. The insurer would pay for the ambulance to take her there. K sobbed uncontrollably and refused the transfer. The administrator left. She returned some 45 minutes later with a form for K to sign. The form said that K refused to transfer to PT Medical Center. We pointed out we had never heard of that place, nor had anyone earlier suggested that K be transferred to PT Medical Center. They had only told her she was to go to WH Hospital. The administrator shrugged and apologized. It was 11:30 pm. K hadn’t slept more than a few hours in days. She was on morphine and still in pain. She refused to sign the discharge form or to accept a transfer to another hospital. It was only later that I realized that the Good Samaritan doctor knew that she was working against the clock in dealing with the insurer. If she could have gotten K admitted to UCLA prior to the insurer becoming actively involved, K may have gotten treatment at the hospital. K was triaged, not because of her illness (although she was critically ill), but in order to get a diagnosis and admission prior to the insurance company prohibiting the same. The specialist doctor could likely have prevailed over a hospital administrator, but she could not prevail against the insurer and hospital administration together. K and I left the hospital near midnight feeling more dejected than I remember feeling otherwise in my life. The California Department of Managed Health Care Although we were both exhausted, K was in too much pain to sleep and I was too overwrought. At 3:00 am I began to draft an appeal letter, an Expedited Grievance, to the insurer. I sent it to them by 8 am Thursday and copied the California Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC). Over the next several days, I was to have many conversations, emails and phone calls with the DMHC, the administrative branch set up to monitor and enforce the insurance contracts sold in California. The DMHC staff always took my calls. They even gave me a direct dial number so I could skip the long voice prompts. They were invariably polite and professional. In the end, they could not do one damn thing whatsoever to change the course of the treatment K received at the hands of her insurance company and the hospitals she ended up in. The Moral of Part 2 of the Story So what is the moral of Part 2 of the story? The moral of Part 2 is twofold. One, health insurance is not health care. Even if insured, you still may not find a primary care doctor or a specialist to treat you. Two, you might be worse off than before because you’re no longer just dealing with hospital administrators. Your own insurance company may actively work to keep a hospital or doctor from treating you.

]]>https://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/the-doctor-is-not-in-part-2-health-insurance-is-not-health-care/feed/2The Doctor is Not In (Part One)-Uninsured in Americahttps://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/the-doctor-is-not-in-part-one-uninsured-in-america/
https://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/the-doctor-is-not-in-part-one-uninsured-in-america/#respondTue, 30 Aug 2016 23:23:15 +0000http://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/?p=27I am going to tell what happened to one person who got sick in America when she was uninsured; after she was insured through an exchange set up under the ACA; after she bought market rate insurance; and finally, what happened when she bought medical care directly. It will take a series of posts. This is the first of what will likely be four or five posts. How We Met K and I met in 2010. She was my Gyrotonic Instructor. I was middle-aged and soft. I couldn’t do one single sit-up. Not one. I could not even remember the time I had done a sit up. Yet, she took me on with all the enthusiasm and good will one often sees in people in that particular line of work. I expected our relationship to be a cordial, but somewhat distant one. Yet, one day when I came to see her, I was very sad. I was so sad that I shared my sadness with her and she absorbed it all, listened to me with her deep brown eyes and comforted me. I don’t recall if I did much exercise or not that day, but I had made a shift. When she left the studio to open her own business in another location, I followed her there. Then She Got Sick In spring of 2011, she got sick. I didn’t know how sick she was. She left town to go to a clinic in another city for treatment. Although, I did not know it at the time, she didn’t get well. She got sicker. Scary sick. She was so sick she could die. She weighed about 85 pounds. Her electrolytes were so low, she was a heart attack risk. She could not keep any food down. She had fevers and boils, sore joints and crippling neck, back and shoulder pain. She came back to Atlanta after three separate hospitalizations, still sick, still weighing 85 pounds, often in a wheelchair, but now owing more than $20,000 of medical debt (she was uninsured). Further, she was suffering from, not only the effects of her illness, but also the effects of massive amounts of steroidal and other drugs she had been given. As K had not benefitted from the care she received, she took her recovery into her own hands. By careful monitoring of her body’s response to food and exercise, she weaned herself off the array of prescription drugs she was taking. Beginning by eating only miso broth with chives, she slowly recovered. She didn’t get really well, but well enough to start teaching me and her other clients again. I didn’t know much about her illness at that time and she wasn’t one to share her own pain or suffering. Since I hadn’t seen her at her sickest, I didn’t know how ill she had been. She didn’t mention all the money she owed. I thought she was doing well. Sick Again Image Source In November 2011, she called me out of the blue and asked me to take her to an ER. She was desperately ill, in tremendous pain, unable to retain food, suffering boils, fevers, debilitating joint pain, headaches, back pain and repeated bouts of bloody diarrhea. That is only a partial list. She was a person in her early thirties who loved to dance. She was a professional dancer. She was dedicated to health and fitness. Her body that she tended, nurtured and trained so carefully betrayed her. She was tremendously ill and this time, I was a witness to her suffering. I was a witness to the actual physical distress she experienced and a witness to the experience of she had as an uninsured, poor person in the medical system. I left her at a local emergency room. I stayed only long enough to see that she was admitted. After a few days, I took her some broth made by a local macrobiotic cook. It was all she could digest. Given the inflammation in her digestive system, she could eat none of the food given to her in the hospital. I asked what the doctors had found. She told me she was going to check herself out. Nothing was being done in the hospital. No tests were ordered. Nothing planned. She had a room and someone regularly came in to check her vital signs. Then Came the Bureaucracy The likely reason the hospital admitted her and then wouldn’t dump her was because of the risk to them of being in violation of EMTALA–Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act. EMTALA provides, among other things, that hospitals cannot transfer a patient if the patient is not stable. Stability has been so broadly defined that some hospitals rarely transfer non-paying patients. (We will see later that not all hospitals have that as a policy). If the patient is uninsured, as K was, they simply do not treat them. Because specialists who were on call could also be exposed to liability under EMTALA, following the passage of EMTALA, specialists limited their practices in order to avoid encountering a non-paying potentially litigious patient. K needed to see a specialist, but none would come to see her. The Social Security Administration Did Not Help After a week of being hospitalized, K checked herself out and went home to her apartment. That was the time we really got to know each other. It was then I found that she had more than $42,000 of medical bills, spread across 27 different providers, including $18,000 from her most recent hospitalization. Since she had barely worked over the preceding months, she thought she was now qualified for the SSI she had applied for months earlier. K’s initial response, when faced with all of the foregoing, was that it was her responsibility to handle dealing with her medical creditors and the SSA. Given the seriousness of her illness and the daunting prospects for her recovery, I felt it would be impossible for her to resolve the financial matters. Consequently, I offered to take on resolving her financial situation as a pro bono matter. In my experience, most lawyers take seriously the obligation to provide pro bono services. I hadn’t gotten my hours in for the year and this was a good opportunity. I began by attempting to assess the status of K’s SSI application. She undoubtedly qualified since she was almost completely unable to work, had little or no income and no assets whatsoever. After several vain attempts to contact the SSA office directly, I contacted the Governor’s office and, with K’s permission sent the Governor’s assistant photos of K, who at the time, looked like an Auschwitz victim. To her credit, the young woman I spoke with provided a real name and phone number for someone to inquire about the SSI claim. Reaching the SSA, however, proved to be futile. The SSA had requested information while K was sick. Since K had failed to respond in a timely manner, her application was dropped and the file closed. If she wanted to pursue obtaining SSI, a new application would need to be filed. A decision whether she would qualify for temporary disability would be made in roughly six months from the date of that new application. Dealing with the Debt The process for resolving the medical bills is almost indescribable. I have worked on many, highly complex matters over the years. Resolving medical debt is not complex. It is instead, much like the case in Dickens’ Bleak House, tedious, repetitive, and filled with traps for the unwary. One hospital gave me the wrong file number, i.e. they could not connect my response (with K’s name, address and birthday) to their own file because of their internal error with their own file number. They were 24 hours away from turning the bill over to collections when I discovered their error. Their initial response was to refuse to accept my untimely response until I presented their letter with the wrong file number set out in bold typeface. Many of the providers required dozens of pages of documentation, detailed financial information, job histories (with confirmation from the state labor department), bank statements, tax filings, sworn statements regarding the accuracy of the documents submitted and on and on. I am not complaining or even saying that they shouldn’t require proof of indigent status prior to forgiving the debt. I am only noting that a sick or illiterate person is in no position to provide them with the foregoing. None of the providers used email. All required information be faxed. Often I sent the same fax many times. I quickly learned that the appropriate action to take was to mail and fax identical letters on the same day, to keep copious notes of whom I spoke with at what specific time and the exact words that were told to me during that conversation. In addition to all the written correspondence, I spoke with all 27 providers numerous times. I estimate that I spoke with all of them 4 or 5 times and the three major creditors no fewer than 8 times, i.e. a total of 120 phone calls. In the end, all of the creditors agreed to reduce the debt by more than 90% of the original amount due and all, except a handful, agreed to forego turning the remainder over to collection agency. Image Source The problem with “all except a handful” is that it still leaves just enough people demanding to be paid who cannot be paid to ruin one’s credit. Further, the terrifying incompetence of the billing/collections departments doesn’t end. As recently as August 25, 2016, two physicians and one laboratory reported debts from 2011 as unpaid to a credit rating agency. The physicians had given us written confirmation that the entire debt would be written off and no further action would be taken in March 2012. So there’s that. Medical debt–the gift that keeps on giving. Moral of the Story This is the end of this first installment of this saga, but there is a moral to the story. The moral of the story is, if one is uninsured, really, really sick and truly indigent, one may not get care or SSI, but one can –if one has dozens of hours of persistent, professional assistance– have medical debt significantly reduced, but not eliminated.

]]>https://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/the-doctor-is-not-in-part-one-uninsured-in-america/feed/0But Now We’re Stressed or How I Learned to Stop Worryinghttps://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/but-now-were-stressed-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying/
https://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/but-now-were-stressed-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying/#respondSat, 27 Aug 2016 22:51:54 +0000http://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/?p=25“We will know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” William Casey Aren’t we all so stressed these days? Today a friend of mine told me that every other item on NPR is about dealing with stress, how to reduce stress, how to manage stress, how to sleep better by de-stressing. It looks like people are experiencing a lot of stress. These days I don’t experience much stress. Really. I don’t. I have had very stressful periods in my life, but these days, not so much. I had a lot of stress when I was in law school. When I started, I had no idea what was involved or how I would do, but it turned out I had a knack for learning the law. I learned to manage my stress. I did well and even became an editor on the law review. I had stress was I was an undergraduate taking a full load of courses and working at Waffle House and Pizza Hut. If I may digress for a moment, people often find it funny that I worked at Pizza Hut and Waffle House. They will remark. “Wow. That must have been fun.” Let me get this straight, your idea of “fun” is standing up for 8-10 hours in a smoky, noisy restaurant, rapidly serving food to people who are often drunk. What exactly would be fun about that? I did have a fun restaurant job one summer in Gatlinburg where I worked in one of the three bars in town. I drank all the bartender’s mistakes. They didn’t have anywhere to practice in a dry county so they made a fair number of mistakes. I was sloshed by 10 pm most evenings, slept in every morning, laid by the pool before work and still made money. That was my idea of fun as a twenty-one-year-old. But back to the topic of stress and my first legal job, which turned out to be the most stressful job of my life–much, much worse than any job I have had before or since. My first legal job My first legal job. What can I say? I worked for a woman who was a humorless, unkind, harridan. I made mistakes. All first-year associates make mistakes. She would ask me “why” I would do such and so. I would respond, “I thought thusly.” She would respond “well, that’s wrong. So why would you do that?” So it would go. It got to the point that I would break out in huge, red welts every day. They would start on upper thighs, move to my midriff and work their way up my body to my neck and face. I just hoped the work day would end before my face was covered in huge, painful, red welts. My co-workers would stop by my office at the day’s end just to see how badly the day had gone. I was utterly miserable. Still, I stuck it out for two years. There were a lot of reasons why I stayed. I had grown up in a household which observed the principle that one worked without regard to the working conditions. I did not expect pleasant working conditions. Then, my dad died the first year I started practicing. Also, I ended a ten-year relationship during that period. I had a lot going on. Still, the real secret reason I stayed was that I was afraid I wouldn’t get another job if I left. Trouble was the longer I stayed, the more demoralized I became and the more impossible it seemed that I could actually work some place else. I was like an abused spouse. If I was treated so badly, it must be because I deserved it. What happened when I left? When I finally left, I ended up with a much better paying job at a prestigious, international law firm where I stayed happily for seventeen years. What does staying in a bad situation have to do with government? By this point, you have to be asking yourself, where is she going with this? What is the point of telling me this? What does this have to do with big government and being a Classical Liberal? Here’s what this story has to do with being a Classical Liberal. Every day in every way, people decide to stay in the hellacious place they are and put up with lies, brutality and incompetence by their “own” government because they are afraid that their lives will be worse if the government doesn’t do what it does. People pay for the incompetence of the Post Office and the DMV, they pay for a business license to run an internet-based business out of their own home, they allow themselves to be monitored by surveillance cameras and tag readers on every corner, they endure uncomplainingly the idiocy of a police officer interfering with their pick-up at the airport (because it might be a ride share driver and not their brother-in-law for Pete’s sake), they allow themselves to be sprayed with pesticides to kill mosquitos carrying the Zika virus they hadn’t even heard of last year, they pay to have people killed in faraway lands they could not find on a map, they explain their health needs to non-English speaking, GED possessing managed care drones, they get scanned and probed every time they get on an airplane and they allow all of this because they are afraid that their lives will get worse! Know what? They are right. Every day, I went into that awful job, my life did get worse. I broke out in hives earlier in the day. I cried more often. I lost more weight. I slept worse. Every day my life got worse until the day I left. Then it got incredibly richer, better, happier and less stressed and it stayed on that trajectory for years. So I am here to tell you, just as soon as you stop believing the lies and accepting the incompetence and brutality of the government, your life will become immeasurably better, your anxiety will dissipate, your sleeplessness with abate and your life will improve in ways you cannot imagine. Trying to be OK with matters that are absolutely wrong is what is causing your stress. As soon as you realize that the government’s actions are intolerable, that everything they say is a lie, you won’t be stressed anymore. You might be angry, but you won’t be stressed and you will sleep soundly knowing that you have faced the reality that was the harridan in your own life and it no longer has power over you.

]]>https://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/but-now-were-stressed-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying/feed/0Is It Time to End Limited Liability for Corporate Shareholders?https://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/is-it-time-to-end-limited-liability-for-corporate-shareholders/
https://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/is-it-time-to-end-limited-liability-for-corporate-shareholders/#respondTue, 16 Aug 2016 20:55:55 +0000http://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/?p=22From time to time people ask me how environmental depredations would be contained in a libertarian world order. They are concerned that libertarians would be unable to address the devastation wrought by companies engaging in, by way of example, mountaintop removal. The obvious answer is that the EPA and federal and state regulators have not prevented mountaintop removal. They have often been unable/unwilling to stop companies from wreaking other environmental havoc. Instead, they have been taken over by the industries the agencies seek to regulate. I should also mention that the EPA has itself been the cause of environmental contamination. Consider, for example, that the EPA contaminated the Animus River in Durango, CO while attempting to remediate contaminated water from the Gold King Mine. Prior to that event, EPA contractors in Greensboro, Georgia struck a water main causing sediment, containing arsenic, mercury, lead and chromium to flow into the Oconee River. That the state has not been able to contain the damages wrought by certain companies is not a sufficient answer to the question of how such damages would be dealt with in a libertarian world. Environmental contamination/degradation is a real problem and to point out that the government hasn’t solved the problem and that it is sometimes a major contributor does not answer that question. So what would happen in a libertarian world order? In a truly anarcho-capitalist world, the limited liability of the shareholders of corporations would be abolished. In a libertarian world order, owners of companies would not be able to garner the special state-created privilege of limited liability for the consequences of corporate acts. If companies engaged in highly risky behavior (e.g. drilling for oil in the Gulf), the owners would be personally liable for the costs of any oil spills. Stunning, huh? It seems so outrageous as to be inconceivable, but there’s no reason that it shouldn’t be conceived and every reason to think it ought to be thought of. The material in this and the next paragraph is drawn from Limited Liability in Historical Perspective by Frederick G. Kimpin, Jr. published in American Business Law Association Journal. If we review the history of corporate entities, we learn that corporations arose when the need to amass capital exceeded the capacity of any single person. Corporate charters have always been granted by the state (or the monarch in earlier times); however, limiting the liability of shareholders was not an essential element of the corporate charter. Corporate forms were sought because corporate charters allowed unrelated parties to easily amass large amounts of capital; they often conferred monopoly privileges on the owners; and, the owners had the right to freely transfer their ownership interests. Most frequently laws in the American states grew out of English law; however, corporate law developed in the United States influenced the development of English law. In both England and America, industrialization was seen as socially beneficial. State legislatures believed that the public would benefit from rapid industrialization. It was the thesis of those wishing to promote rapid industrialization that entities would be able to more rapidly amass large capital sums if the liability of the owners was limited. Beginning in roughly 1830, industrialists were able to convince state legislators that limited liability of shareholders was essential to their burgeoning enterprises and also to prevent the flight of capital from one state to another. Once again, we see how a state, by attempting to legislatively solve a problem best left to the market participants, created a new problem that influences us today in ways unimagined by the creators of the law. Prior to states creating corporate entities with limited liability, all owners were personally liable for the consequences of their business enterprises. If a manufacturer dumped his coal ash on his neighbor’s property, that was a trespass and the dumper was liable for damages. Once real people who were owners were immunized from personal liability, it was more difficult to attach liability to the bad acting corporate owner. If the corporate owner dumped his coal ash in the local stream, it was not legally immune from the act, but its shareholders were. Instead of dealing with a single bad actor likely on the same financial footing as himself, the injured party had to sue the well capitalized corporate entity and to sue it in a court which was not inclined to view his suit favorably when the industry was employing so many people and providing so many new products to others. If shareholders were no longer immune from liability for corporate acts and corporate debt, undoubtedly the impact would be huge. First of all, each company would be highly motivated to create very safe business operations. Secondly, “owners” in name only would disappear. Who would want to own part of an enterprise that exposed them to personal liability when they had no control over the business operations? Would we have seen a day where a corporation bought its own stock with borrowed funds? Such an act would substantially increase the liability of the remaining shareholders. No sensible owner would agree to substantially increase his own personal liability for no additional benefit to himself or the business enterprise, i.e. the leveraged buyback of stock through the issuance of corporate bonds, which has contributed to the current rise in stock market prices, would never have happened. We have a much more recent example of the cost of shifting liability from real people to remote owners if we look at what has happened with Wall Street over the last thirty (30) years. Prior to thirty (30) years ago, the investment banks on Wall Street were run as partnerships, not as corporations. That is, the partners in the investment banks were personally liable for the obligations of the investment banks. As Michael Lewis was quoted in AEI: John Gutfreund did violence to the Wall Street social order—and got himself dubbed the King of Wall Street—when he turned Salomon Brothers from a private partnership into Wall Street’s first public corporation…. he seized the day. He and the other partners not only made a quick killing; they transferred the ultimate financial risk from themselves to their shareholders. It didn’t, in the end, make a great deal of sense for the shareholders. But it made fantastic sense for the investment bankers. From that moment, though, the Wall Street firm became a black box. The shareholders who financed the risks had no real understanding of what the risk takers were doing, and as the risk-taking grew ever more complex, their understanding diminished. The moment Salomon Brothers demonstrated the potential gains to be had by the investment bank as public corporation, the psychological foundations of Wall Street shifted from trust to blind faith. No investment bank owned by its employees would have levered itself 35 to 1 or bought and held $50 billion in mezzanine C.D.O.s. I doubt any partnership would have sought to game the rating agencies or leap into bed with loan sharks or even allow mezzanine C.D.O.s to be sold to its customers. The hoped-for short-term gain would not have justified the long-term hit. Now I asked Gutfreund about his biggest decision. “Yes,” he said. “They—the heads of the other Wall Street firms—all said what an awful thing it was to go public and how could you do such a thing. But when the temptation arose, they all gave in to it.” He agreed that the main effect of turning a partnership into a corporation was to transfer the financial risk to the shareholders. “When things go wrong, it’s their problem,” he said—and obviously not theirs alone. When a Wall Street investment bank screwed up badly enough, its risks became the problem of the U.S. government [aka the U.S. taxpayer, see comments]. “It’s laissez–faire until you get in deep shit,” he said, with a half chuckle. He was out of the game. In his remark that investment banking is laissez-faire “until you get in deep shit,” Gutfreund is saying what we all know to be true. The gambling losses on Wall Street are backed by the full faith and credit of the United States taxpaying public. So, today, the government has compounded the recklessness of Wall Street. Not only are the investment bankers not personally liable as they were when they were partners, but even the potential losses of shareholders have been backstopped by the US Treasury. In theory, shareholders could share in the losses the banks created, but even that possibility is forestalled by the backstop from the US government. Surely, we can see the devastating effects of removing personal liability from actors if we consider the actions of the Wall Street bankers over the last few decades. In The Righteous Mind, Why Good People are Divided By Politics and Religion, Jonathan Haidt imagines that a powerful central government can limit the damages caused by corporations. He imagines that the evil of regulatory capture can be avoided. He imagines that rules can contain the damages done by entities in which, ultimately, no one is personally responsible. There is no evidence that is so and all the evidence is to the contrary. As was noted in an earlier post, at the time of the financial crisis, there were 115 agencies regulating the financial sector. Would one more agency have made a difference? Between 2014 and 2015, the economy grew only 2.6%, but the federal outlay for business regulation grew by 4.2%. If those new regulations do nothing else, they do increase the cost of starting a new business. We need to ask ourselves if layering on additional regulations will solve problems or only create new problems? At what point does the cost of complying with new regulations outweigh any potential benefit to be achieved? There is little evidence that the state has, by creating new laws, undone the damage it did by enacting earlier laws. It may be time to return to first principles and allow humans to be held responsible for the consequences of their acts. Let’s begin to discuss phasing out shareholder’s immunity for corporate acts.

]]>https://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/is-it-time-to-end-limited-liability-for-corporate-shareholders/feed/0Will You Sacrifice Your Children to Achieve Equality?https://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/will-you-sacrifice-your-children-to-achieve-equality/
https://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/will-you-sacrifice-your-children-to-achieve-equality/#commentsFri, 12 Aug 2016 15:50:07 +0000http://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/?p=16Many years ago when my son was about three I was chatting about plans for his schooling. I planned to send my son to public school. The man I was speaking with said, “You sound so positive. You must have had a good school experience.” Those simple words rocked my world. I hadn’t had a good school experience. I had loathed school from almost the day I entered it till I finally slunk out of high school demoralized, nearly defeated and despondent. The funny part of this is that I was a wise child in a way. While I was in school and hating it, it occurred to me that I might not have enough experience to know if I really did hate it. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe school was OK. It was only after I grew up and had more experience, I realized my feelings were accurate. I had hated school. What on earth was I thinking when I said I would send my son to public school? Truth be told, I wasn’t thinking at all. I was unconscious. I was methodically proceeding step by step down a path without thinking at all. I doubt the man I spoke with remembers me or his casual remark, but I am forever grateful to him. He woke me from my slumber and (I believe) saved my son from years of boredom, depression, Ritalin and a 12-year sentence to an institution that is designed by bureaucrats. I was reminded of this story today when I spoke with a friend whose daughter is expected to not express her lively, sparkling intelligence because her classroom is a place of equality and her expression of her unique qualities, her special smarts, and her incisive insights are not contributing to everyone feeling equal. All of which caused me to tell my friend, “Damn straight. Tell her to go get ’em. She’s not crazy. They are.” I look back now at how I barely held on through on those years of schooling–so unsure of myself that I couldn’t even say for sure if I did hate school. Why wouldn’t I hate it? It was beyond tedious. By the time I went to school, my dad had spent untold evenings reading stories to us while we clustered around him in the red rocking chair. I remember the story about Pete of the Steel Mills that ended with Pete dying in blast furnace accident. That story always made my dad choke up. I remember another one about a man traveling in the desert who met a bushman in the Kalahari who saved his life. I knew a good story when I heard one. Then I went to school and we were supposed to read Spot and Jane “stories.” Stories so stupid, so pointless, so insipid they would make a nun swear. This was school. Hate it? Hate was a weak word. I loathed it. I lived for recess and the really good yeast rolls at lunch. Those things were small compensation, but I took comfort where I found it. Forty years ago, it was boring. It was boring to be in school with students who could barely read a sentence in 8th grade. It was boring to read things that had nothing at all to do with my life or the life of anyone I knew or had any prospect of knowing. I don’t disbelieve the things I heard in history class, I just can’t remember them. They seemed irrelevant then. Now I think they were. My father told us the story of his own grandfather running from the Southern conscriptors during the Civil War and losing an axe while he made his escape. I still remember that story. I remember practicing my multiplication tables with my mother while we tied tobacco hands in the barn, but I can’t remember a single thing I learned in school between 1st and 12th grade. I am racking my brain and nothing comes up. I can’t even conceive of how horrible it must be to be in school today. Think about it. There’s a whole system devoted to telling you that you do not have unique talents and capabilities. It tells you that you are just the same as everyone else. It doesn’t tell you that your task is to discover how you can contribute your gifts to the world. Instead, it recites false platitudes, that anyone can become anything they want. Everyone is equal. Others that you may perceive as not trying very hard, others who are not kind, others who cannot read the things that fascinate and enthrall you–all of these people are your equal. That is a lie. The last thing on earth that is true of people is that they are equal. They are not equal in gifts. They are not equal in spirit. They are not equal in intelligence. In short, they are not equal.To prove my point, I’ll tell you another story. Many years ago, before I went to law school, I worked in an inpatient psychiatric hospital. A few of our patients were chronic schizophrenics who were admitted from time to time to restabilize on their medications. When they were out of the hospital, they were on the verge of being homeless. People stole their medications and their tiny disability funds. They lived a very hard and tenuous existence. Even in the hospital when medicated they ranted and raved about things I didn’t understand. One day, one of the men, who I will call Dan (not his real name), was yelling and threatening people in the ward. I really wanted to ignore him. I couldn’t understand his rants and I was a little scared of him. I also knew that nothing I would do or say would change the fundamentals of his life. Still, I had a job, so I said, “hey, Dan. What gives?” In a very confused stream of consciousness with lots of interjections, he told me of his very bad, horrible day: how his doctor had told him he would be discharged, how the apartment manager had stood him up while he was looking for a place to live, how he had missed the last bus and had to walk for miles to return to the hospital, how he had lost his tiny bit of money and now he didn’t know what to do next. He had had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day and when he finally made it back to the hospital, no one had even asked him how his day had gone until he began to cuss and throw things in the day room. I am still moved by our conversation 38 years later. After he was discharged and robbed, he came to the hospital to ask for help. I lent him some change for a phone call. Later, he took a bus–which cost at least .75 cents–to come to the hospital and repay me the .50 cents I had given him for the phone call. Why is this relevant to bad schools and equality? I will tell you why it is relevant. It is relevant because through everything Dan went through, through his poverty, though his incredibly debilitating mental illness, through his entire life which I cannot even imagine bearing up under, Dan was unique. He was kind. He strove to be responsible and to do the right thing. No one was his equal and he was not equal to anyone. He was an extraordinary human being, conducting his life with all the dignity and honor that he could muster. I met a lot of severely mentally ill people in the 3 years I worked at the hospital. Some were manipulative. Some had resigned themselves to lives of dependency. A few were even dangerous. But one thing I learned was that mental illness has little or nothing to do with a person’s character. In some ways, even this particular illness, which seems to affect so much of the person suffering, is separate from the person that suffers. The character, the uniqueness of the human being, the essential quality of the person exists in the face of all that the illness entails. That is why I remember, acknowledge and respect Dan. To hell with equality. Let’s respect people for the extraordinary, unique beings they are and the qualities they manifest.

]]>https://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/will-you-sacrifice-your-children-to-achieve-equality/feed/13Imagining Our Place in the World and Taking Right Actionhttps://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/imagining-our-place-in-the-world-and-taking-right-action/
https://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/imagining-our-place-in-the-world-and-taking-right-action/#commentsMon, 08 Aug 2016 23:09:03 +0000http://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/?p=14For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. Wendell Berry Lately, I have been giving a lot of thought to this topic of what is my responsible relationship to the world? I am semi-retired now. I find that I do not have the energy or enthusiasm for the work that engaged me for the last thirty years. Now that the feelings are gone, I find that I cannot work without them. Recently I declared to my coach,”I am going to figure out what I want in my life and go and get it.” In short, I am in the process of re-imagining my place in the world. The place I occupied previously no longer exists. Sounds simple enough, right? It’s actually not that simple. I think if I were like a character in a Wendell Berry book, it would be clearer. To begin with, I would have a place, a real physical residence that was mine, which I would have–through my living in it– made it my own. I would have neighbors who know me and my quirks and oddities. I do not have that. Instead, I have a small apartment in an older house in an older neighborhood with new neighbors I see when I walk the dog. If I were still practicing law, I would have work colleagues, occasional lunches, client calls, activities to fill the day. Of course, this would be coupled with the anxiety of not being as capable and as fast as I was at one time, but I have learned nothing in life if not how to mask anxiety. I going to share a secret that older people don’t like to share aloud. It’s true, we are often not as quick and bright as we were only a few years ago. Most of us hope that no one will notice. I have friends who are still working who are older than I. Sometimes they tell me how they are counting the years or months to retirement. They hope they will not end up “in a closet.” A closet is where their co-workers are consigned when they no longer do productive needed work, but are to difficult to let go due to their seniority. Everyone recognizes they are not [as] productive anymore, but they show up everyday until the pension is fully earned. I suppose that too can be a way of postponing imagining one’s place in the world. To forestall hearing repeat of some advice given me a few years ago, when I had more time than I could fill with gainful employment, it has already been suggested that I join the Peace Corps so that I could experience real hardship. What a bizarre suggestion. I hadn’t thought of myself as a person who was seeking to experience real hardship; or, to the converse, whose life had been so easy that hardship would be new to me. I still puzzle over it. In any case, I have now spent just enough time in the developing world to realize that living in it for any significant period of time would kill me. Undoubtedly that would solve the difficulty of finding my place in the world, but that isn’t quite what I had in mind. That does mean the Peace Corps is out. Still, I know I am not alone is wondering about my place in the world; therefore, my public musings may be of some value. This Atlantic article discusses the increasing death rate of middle aged white Americans. It appears that a number of people have lost their place in the world. The article links the death rate to increasing alienation of people from their community, the loss of good paying manufacturing jobs, the increased divorce rate, the increased use of prescription opiates, the waning of religious belief and even the lack of a strong social safety net. Me? I think the strong social safety net works much like the closet for those still working, but not contributing. It allows one to avoid the question of what one is to do with one’s life. For better or worse, having adopted Libertarianism as a guiding political philosophy and being by nature an existentialist (existentialism: a philosophical theory or approach that emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will), I tend not to think that a strong social safety net would fill my need to have a responsible relationship to the world. One thing that I did find is that it is easier to come up with the negatives (do no harm) than it is to come up with the affirmative actions that are required to have a responsible relationship to the world. More and more I have settled on the idea that it is necessary to see as clearly as possible what is truly happening and then speak that truth. This is harder than it sounds. Speaking the truth requires that I distinguish between fact and opinion, which I am pretty good at. (I find it is a distinction that is lost on many people these days.) Then, after sorting out the facts, one must look at right action. It is clearly insufficient to intend a good outcome. One must proceed carefully to see that a good outcome can be reasonably expected. On that note, I can’t get over the President saying his worst mistake was failing to have a plan for Libya after assassinating Gaddafi. I mean, WHAT? According to the BBC here’s what the President said when asked the question what was his worst mistake as president, “Probably failing to plan for the day after, what I think was the right thing to do, in intervening in Libya.” Mr. President, are you five? Have you not heard that the night follows the day? Have you no sense of history? No advisors to turn to? Nothing? If you had been forced to say what you expected the next day, could you have come up with an answer? The USG does a big thing on Thursday and has no plan for Friday. What the hell? All of which I could almost stand, if I thought anyone had learned anything at all from that, but clearly they have not given the current plans for Syria. Assuming that the USG and its allies can and do remove Assad, then what? I have heard nothing of a plan for the day after that happens. All of which I still might be able to stand, if I did not see this in every act of government at every level of government every day of the week. It is as if they never think of the consequences of their acts. They intend some unspecified good and let the devil take the hindmost. Closer to home, recently I was reading (again) about the Uber/Lyft drivers in Atlanta who are being ticketed for picking up riders at the airport. My own City Council representative, Yolanda Adrean, is quoted as saying that ticketing and fining the drivers is “a waste of police resources.” I agree that it is a waste of police resources to ticket drivers and/or impound their vehicles when they are performing a highly desirable service at a cost people are willing to pay, especially when the results are to drive down employment and increase arrest records for what is, predominantly, a group of black Atlantans. (I’m not saying it would be OK if they white, but really, Atlanta has SUCH an issue with unemployed black people that one would think the City would not do anything to inhibit their ability to get paying work. One would be wrong.) The most galling part of this expensive, time consuming, life destroying fiasco is the reaction of the “law givers” that somehow tickets/fines and jail time are a surprise. Did the Council not expect the regulations would be enforced, thereby not wasting police resources? I mean, really, what is their expectation? The City Council passes a law about something that no one, but them and a handful of taxi drivers, is concerned about. The effect of the law is the same as it always is–fines/jail time for the violators. Then one of the council members complains that the police are enforcing the law. How about we just not pass a law in the first place if we do not want the consequences of devoting resources to enforcing it? That would be one idea. All of which brings me back to how I began this post, which is, first, about each of us having a responsible relationship to the world by understanding our place in it, and secondly, about being older, which it turns out has benefits as well as shortcomings. If one manages to stay awake, keep out of the closet and act mindfully, one can anticipate that, in a complex world, consequences (intended or otherwise) always ensue. If you are striving to be in that responsible relationship, act carefully, do no harm and remember consequences always ensue. Next time you are tempted to say, “we ought to do thus and so,” ask yourself, have I thought about what happens next?

]]>https://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/imagining-our-place-in-the-world-and-taking-right-action/feed/3Coercive Engineered Migration As a Weapon of Warhttps://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/coercive-engineered-migration-as-a-weapon-of-war/
https://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/coercive-engineered-migration-as-a-weapon-of-war/#respondMon, 01 Aug 2016 14:34:33 +0000http://mainstreetlibertarian.liberty.me/?p=12Recently an acquaintance of mine posted this youtube video from political author, Gearoid O. Colmain. In the video, Colmain is referring to the conditions in Paris following a series of coordinated terrorist acts which happened on November 13, 2015. On that date, gunmen and suicide bombers hit a concert hall, a major stadium, restaurants and bars, almost simultaneously – and left 130 people dead and hundreds wounded. When I first listened to the video, I thought Colmain was referring to the conditions in Paris following the murder of some 84 people on Bastille Day, Thursday, July 14, 2016, by Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, a 31 year old Tunisian citizen living in Paris. When I listened to the video again, I realized Colmain was actually speaking of the French response to the November 13, 2015 attacks–which shows one how contrived the responses are to these events. The manner of carrying out the murders varies, but the response of the state is the same–a call for more violence against people living far from France, a call for French citizens to give up more of their rights, especially their right to speak freely about the terrorist events, and calls to continue mass migration into France. I think understanding the French situation is instructive since the USG engages in very much the same responses to the American people as the French government does to French citizens following the mass death of civilians. Likely the French government is acting at the direction of the USG. As Colmain notes, France has no foreign policy. France (and Germany) take direction from the USG. In any case, Colmain says some things that are worthy of note and which certainly have come to pass, including: “There is no war on terror. There is a war being waged using terrorist proxy groups.” Those proxy groups are being used to wage war against nation states who are opposing the USG and Israel; Terrorist groups are trained by the US intelligence agencies; The French government is now (in November 2015) attempting to drum up support for more military intervention in Syria. Those attacks promptly followed. The response to the Bastille Day attack was exactly as the speaker stated–an increased bombing of Syria, which included massive Syrian civilian casualties; The influx of new refugees will continue and will destabilize central Europe; There are no moderate rebels in Syria. There are only terrorists (many of whom have been trained and armed by the USG and NATO) who have been beheading people (recently a a 10 year old child was beheaded); The French government is allowing the most extreme Muslims to immigrate to and expand their influence in Europe, a process he calls the “Wahabisising” of the youth. This will create massive social unrest and lead to martial law. At minute 6, Colmain calls the current migration crisis “coercive engineered migration.” This was a new phrase for me. The phrase was coined by Kelly M. Greenhill, in her 2010 book, Weapons of Mass Migration. Greenhill posits that mass migration is a tool the USG uses to overwhelm another nation’s ability to deal with the influx of refugees. As Europe becomes increasingly overwhelmed, the power of NATO, the USG, and the CIA are enhanced. But how do the events in France relate to the conditions in America? If it is the USG that is instigating these events, how does that affect Americans? Is this done for the benefit of Americans? Colmain is clear that the actions taken by the USG are not for the benefit of American citizens. He begins at minute 1 by saying that the war on civilians in France is orchestrated from abroad. The attacks on Syria are likewise orchestrated from abroad. The party instigating those wars are the USG and Israel. People need to understand that there is a war that is becoming global that is being waged against civilian populations. The war on the civilian populations is a form of neo-imperialism and neocolonialism that aims to divide and conquer in order to make the people of Europe submit to a global order that does not serve the interest of the majority of people on the planet but does serve the interest of a very small and tyrannical ruling elite. Now let us look at what is happening in America. Americans have also been subjected to an increasing series of terrorist acts. Many of those acts have been perpetrated by Muslims. (I recognize that the preceding sentence would be subject to much debate. Some commentators have even suggested even the Boston Marathon bombing should not be properly classed as a terrorist act. But I am not writing for the purpose of proving the bad nature of Muslims. I am writing for the purpose of exploring the USG’s use of mass murder of civilians for its own purposes). The USG’s response to incidents of mass civilian murder of Americans by Muslims have included: increased attempts to destabilize Syria causing massive civilian death (Removal of Assad would increase the flow of refugees from the African continent into both Europe and America.) attempts to control American’s rights to own certain weapons; attempts to suppress free speech, e.g. Attorney General Loretta Lynch told a group assembled for the Muslim Advocates dinner, following the San Bernardino shootings, that the Justice Department is prepared to take “aggressive action” against people employing anti-Muslim rhetoric that “edges towards violence;” an increase in the surveillance state broadening the USG’s authority to search citizens; an huge increase in the number of Muslim charter schools in the US, as founded by Fethullah Gulen. How does the USG use coercive engineered migration in American? According to Greenhill, coercive engineered migration can also be used to exploit the conflict between competing political interest groups. As I discussed earlier at this post, this is the manner in which the USG uses migration against Americans. By using the tool in this manner, the USG creates internal conflicts between groups thus achieving two ends. First, it masks that it is the instigator of the conflict between civilians. Secondly, it garners new authority to “settle” conflicts and to punish the guilty citizens. My point is that the American people are no safer from the actions of a very small and tyrannical ruling elite acting through the USG, NATO, the CIA, etc, than European citizens are. As noted in an earlier post, the USG has murdered American citizens for its own purposes in the past. There is every reason to think that agents in that entity are willing to do so today. I watch in disbelief as my Facebook feed fills with images of people chasing Pokemon and laughing at Melania Trump. I can see that the bread and circuses serve effectively to lull many of my fellow citizens into a quiet slumber. The more informed of them swallow in one gulp the narrative that one only objects to mass migration if one is a racist. They too have nothing to say about the mass murder of civilians conducted by the USG, likely because it is their man in the White House. Dang. I hate that.